Elevator Pitch
9 years ago at PyCon US 2011 7 women met to start what we know today as PyLadies. What has made PyLadies so successful - its decentralization and regional autonomy - has presented PyLadies with new challenges in 2020. Join two regional PyLadies organizers as they present a vision for PyLadies 2.0!
Description
9 years ago an initial group of 7 women met at PyCon USA 2011 began the world of what we know today as PyLadies. Since 2011, PyLadies has grown to 100+ chapters worldwide and the growth doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon! What has made PyLadies so successful in the past - it’s decentralization and high degree of chapter autonomy - has presented PyLadies with unseen new challenges in 2020 such as burnout, resource stagnation, and ultimately not allowed PyLadies to respond to the global community of 2020.
Join two regional PyLadies organizers as they present what PyLadies has in store for the future including a global vision for community engagement and open source projects open to all.
Notes
The intent of this talk is to continue to help build a public discussion that celebrates the wins of PyLadies and invites the community to help us think about what will be next for PyLadies. Of particular interest, the speakers main takeaways for this talk include:
- Identify what PyLadies is by addressing popular (but wrong/inaccurate) beliefs about PyLadies.
- Learn the positive impact of PyLadies and how it helps improve diversity in Python community
- Seek input for a PyLadies model that continues to champion PyLadies as an inclusive space for all our global members
Below is a planned outline for the talk:
The past (~5 min)
- 2011 PSF grant from Audrey Roy started PyLadies with the work continued at PyCon 2011 Atlanta with 7 initial members
- Why do we need this space? Identify the community as it existed in 2011
The present (~7.5 min)
- Is a global community. A project of the PSF. Identify the community as it exists in 2020
- Positive impact:
- PyLadies members representing as speakers at conferences worldwide
- Highlight PyLadies members as open source contributors and maintainers
- PyCon financial aid recipients
- Challenges:
- Decentralized, individually organized
- Identity crisis. What is PyLadies? What does it mean to start a chapter?
- Unable to provide support such as: merchs, speaker resources, sponsorship
- PyLadies feels at times like a set of isolated physical communities
The future: what are the next steps? (~ 7.5 min)
- Explain the origin for the proposed PyLadies global model including the project teams
- Project teams allow PyLadies to become a truly open source project as these are opportunities open to everyone
Call to action: How can you help us (~ 5 min)
- Share with your networks and PyLadies chapters
- Help us identify meaningful heuristics to continue to iterate on our model development
- Participate in workgroups
- Support local PyLadies chapter near you